By Jonathan with Elspeth 

Today began another exciting day at Salish Sea Sciences where students had to count snails. After eating a wonderful choose-your-own cold breakfast, we traveled to Jackson Beach to count any garden snails that could be found. This was a very exciting activity and no one got bored at all, in fact, many of us were quoted as having said the experience was quite amazing. After this incredibly engaging activity, we returned to prepare for the next activity, which was a visit to a place full of life: Dead Man’s Bay. 

At Dead Man’s Bay, we built upon the previous activity of counting snails by counting more snails. We learned more effective ways of counting, such as through the use of quadrats. A quadrat was a frame we placed along specific areas, where we then counted the number of a specific species within the frame. This number can then be used as a sample to estimate the distribution of a species in the area. We also used transacts and counted along them. After having a tasty lunch of sandwiches (why is lunch always sandwiches?), we counted echinoderms, limpets, barnacles, mollusks, and you guessed it: snails. This was an incredibly tedious task as there were often hundreds of these little critters every foot. Still, we prevailed in the end and finished counting before the tide could get to us. After that, we returned to prepare for our next activities and to relax, something much needed after counting thousands of snails.